The funny part here is that back in 2002, this same deal almost
happened for the same reason — but Michael Dell shut down any EMC
acquisition talks before they could happen because he didn't want
to "bet the company."

Apparently in the early 2000s, top Dell executives, including
former President and CEO Kevin Rollins, were concerned that
Dell's fortunes were too heavily banked on the PC industry.

At the time, Dell's model revolved on its economies of scale,
squeezing every inch of efficiency it could out of the PC
manufacturing process to sell custom computers at a high margin.
Instead of innovating with new kinds of hardware, Dell just
pumped out a lot of PCs quickly.

AP

Rollins suggested an acquisition of EMC, then worth $16 billion,
to add its enterprise storage business to Dell's lineup and hedge
against any kind of PC shakeup.

But Michael Dell was spooked. He was technically no longer
CEO of the company, but he still exerted a lot of influence at
Dell. After a prior acquisition, ConvergeNet, hadn't gone well in
1999, he was gun-shy about any new purchases, let alone one that
would drastically change what Dell was all about.

Michael Dell's big plan was to get into consumer electronics
instead.

But that didn't really work out. Stuff like TVs and printers were
already cheaply available when Dell got into the game, meaning
that it's time-tested approach of being cheap and fast didn't
really add anything. And because its model didn't leave a lot of
room for research and development, Dell couldn't offer consumers
anything that wasn't already available elsewhere.

Fast forward a few years and those Dell executives look downright
prescient. Dell was left behind in a changing
market. Hewlett-Packard and IBM had invested in their
enterprise-services businesses, including storage, while Dell's
consumer electronics efforts had fallen flat.

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Commons

Meanwhile, the commoditization of the PC and the entry of
Asian-market competitors like Asus and Lenovo meant that Dell's
price advantage was melting away. Plus, that lack of R&D
meant that Dell was terminally late to mobile and tablets, since
it was stuck in a PC-first mindset.

In 2012, Dell's business was seriously lacking. In 2013, Dell and
Silver Lake took the company private in the biggest deal of its
kind. And today, in 2015, Dell is snapping up EMC after all, for
exactly the same reason — protection against a changing PC
industry.

The real question is whether it's too late, or whether it would
have been too late in 2002.